Step 1: The German government invents a new tax back in 2011 (before Fukushima even) making German energy utilities pay the government for using the nuclear fuel rods they already use.

Step 2: The utilities raise the price of energy they produce directly after that so the German consumer covers this arbitrary government interference.

Step 3: The German supreme court now rules that this tax is unconstitutional (you can’t just make up taxes that don’t have a constitutional basis, not even in Germany) and that the German government must now pay back the six billion euros (with interest) it took from these utilities.

Step 4 (still to come): The utilities will not compensate the German consumer nor reduce the price increases it passed on to them for having had to pay for this illegal German government tax.

Step 5 (still to come): The German government has already spent the six billion euros, of course, so it will need to round up that money from somewhere else.

Step 6 (just a question): Who do you think the German government is going to get this money from?

The system is rund (round), as the German say. And it works perfectly, as usual.

Unless you’re a bird, of course. Or you’re a truck driver transporting turbine blades on a German autobahn.

The giant turbine blade fell when the transporter which was transporting it was involved in an accident on the A33 autobahn near Bielefeld. The blade was knocked across the entire width of the autobahn when another lorry ran into the back of one of the transporter’s escort vehicles.

An energy revolution? Then pay up front, Germany. It’s going to cost you a zillion dollars and you may not be able to come up with the cash for it later.

Germany spent 25 billion euros ($26 billion) on renewable energy in 2016, most of which—23 billion euros—consumers paid through a surcharge on their electricity bills. The rise in that surcharge is the single biggest reason that the amount the average German household spent on electricity rose to 1,060 euros in 2016, up 50% from 2007.

We Germans don’t care that “Germany isn’t an ideal place for solar and wind power.” We’re green. And we’re going to stay green and pay green (one of the highest electricity rates in the developed world) until we’re green in the face.

Once, German utilities like E.on and RWE had a sound business model that produced cheap energy from nuclear factories. That’s how the two companies could be kind to investors, workers, and taxpayers…

Then the green revolution caught up with the utility sector, as German government decided to abandon nuclear for green energy. “In the aftermath of the Fukushima catastrophe, the German government (Angela Merkel) has resorted to an overhasted exit from nuclear energy until 2022,” explains investment analyst Martin Burdenski. “This decision was in stark contrast to a lifetime extension of existing nuclear plants in 2010…”

“The companies will now receive compensation for investments made between the lifetime extension in fall 2010 and the abandonment of nuclear energy in 2011.”

You know, like the appropriate or suitable compensation that the German government will now how to pay to the power companies it expropriated after the infamous (and ongoing) Fukushima Panic Attack of 2011?

Of course what this appropriate or suitable compensation will actually end up being once the non-atomic dust settles is quite another matter. Something tells me it’s going to be a whole lot. Hey, nichts ist umsonst. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Power firms brought a legal challenge on Tuesday against a German government decision to shut down the country’s nuclear plants by 2022, a lawsuit that could allow them to claim 19 billion euros ($21 billion) in damages.

The decision deprived the utilities of one of their main sources of profit and pitched them into crisis as the focus moved to renewables and electricity prices tumbled.

Let’s see… The reactor is under control – still. There are no cancer deaths or deformed babies to report after the radiation in Japan. Not one. The UN (UNSCEAR) even predicts that there will be no significant increase in the cancer rate in the area at all. The exclusion zone around Fukushima keeps getting smaller and smaller. Japan is not saying no to nuclear energy. Im Gegenteil (on the contrary): After a short break, Japan has returned wholeheartedly to nuclear energy. France and America never contemplated doing away with nuclear energy. Of all the countries that have access to nuclear energy, only Germany has taken such drastic action.

By the way, the fish in the waters around Fukushima have no more higher level of radiation than the fish found in the North Sea. Put that in your Spiegel and smoke it.

But the Atomausstieg (nuclear phase-out) – in Germany – was certainly worth it (this is what Germans still repeat to themselves before going to bed each night).

Well, maybe “worth it” isn’t quite the right term to use, taking into account the outrageous wind and solar energy subsidies that have driven/are still driving energy prices up through the roof here in Germany. But other than that, though, everything seems to be going to plan.

I’ve just got to ask: Are these the same people who planned Germany’s refugee policy, too?

On the double! And no, you’re not seeing double. Electricity prices have nearly doubled for German consumers since 2000.

So I guess this famous German Energiewende (energy turnaround) is what one could call a two-edged sword. You know, something having a double meaning?

Germans are leading a double life if you ask me. If they still think that this is going to work, I mean. So stop the double-talk already, people. Get this Energiewende nonsense over with on the double before you end up doubled up with laughter – and those men in the white coats come to take you away.

The price of electricity for private households in Germany has gone up 38 percent since 2008.

It’s easy to do, all you other countries out there. Just follow Germany’s example and shut down all of your nuclear power plants in a panic and then force through the construction of renewable wind and solar energy plants that are neither energy nor cost-efficient enough and then have them heavily subsidized by these households. That turns things around in no time.

We all knew somehow that the Germans themselves could not be responsible for this. Now we know why.

Coal mining’s demise in Germany comes as the country is experiencing a resurgence in coal-fired power, one which the U.S. increasingly has helped supply. U.S. exports of power plant-grade coal to Germany have more than doubled since 2008.

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
- Frederic Bastiat

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
- Margaret Thatcher

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
- H.L. Mencken

It is like information theory; it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included.
- Philip K. Dick

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
- Henry Kissinger

Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

German schadenfreude knows no bounds, particularly when it comes to the United States. The country loves to feel superior to a superpower like America. Yet Germany also harbors a childish infatuation with Obama — one which has little political grounding. The reasons are psychological. …The criticism of America has always been a bit infantile. One is familiar with the theory from psychoanalysis, when people talk about transference, or when suppressed feelings or emotions are overcome by projecting them onto others. It may work for a while, improving one’s feeling of self-worth by devaluing an imagined adversary. But it always falls short. Which is why the ritual must be constantly carried out anew.
- Jan Fleischhauer

Intellectuals, in the words of the writer Eric Hoffer, "cannot operate at room temperature." They are excited by daring opinions, clever theories, sweeping ideologies, and utopian visions of the kind that caused so much trouble during the 20th century. The kind of reason that expands moral sensibilities comes not from grand intellectual "systems" but from the exercise of logic, clarity, objectivity, and proportionality.
- Steven Pinker

The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature... The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period.
- William James

A doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in that self.
- Eric Hoffer

The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the 'God' of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be 'one and only' and to be 'infinite'; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its mono-ideistic bent, both 'pass to the limit' and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set.

Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.- William James